Does Your Feedburner Count Bounce

Does your Feedburner count seem to bounce up and down on a daily basis. Monday’s it’s fairly good, better on Tuesday, but then a big drop by the end of the week, and a precipitous fall at weekends? Is it because old subscribers unsubscribe at regular intervals or is it just natural fluctuations due to the actual activity of the countless feed readers out there?

I thought I’d do a quick analysis of some of my feeds to see if I could spot a pattern. As I said the feedcount fluctuates quite widely over the course of the week, but any day-to-day downward fluctuations across all my blog feeds are never more than 5% unless there’s a big outage at Google Reader or another site and in general the trend is upwards. If you think about it, there might be a large proportion of your subscribers who grab your feed from work or school but don’t log into those accounts at weekends. Conversely, there are some people who will only check feeds at weekend when they’re not working.

Of course, if you’ve only got 100 feed subscribers, a drop of five may seem like quite a few of your virtual buddies took umbrage and signed off. Such a drop might trigger you to frantically rearrange stuff on your blog and maybe change direction for today’s post. But, hold off doing anything too radical on that basis, next day you may be up to 107. So, did you get 12 new readers, or did the missing 5 simply show up in Feedburner’s stats and you gained 7 genuinely new readers?

I think the latter is far more plausible, especially when I consider the feedcount for Sciencebase. Sciencebase has almost 3000 subscribers (2908 at a peak last week) but I see the same percentage drops over the course of the week, which are then back to previous values by the following Tuesday. I doubt very much I’m suddenly losing and gaining so many different people at a turn. It really has to be simple analytics fluctuations at Feedburner.

So, the bottom line is: if you’re looking at your feed count over the course of a month say, and seeing a slight climb, then you’re doing well, even if there are peaks and troughs in between. In other words, it looks worse than it is when you see a drop. And, of course when it’s a climb from an average then that really is new people subscribing. So, as I’ve said before in a different context - Don’t Panic.